According to a Computerworld article, BlackBerry is exploring putting itself up for sale, as the company falls into 4th place in the mobile market. IDC statistics that show Android leads the mobile market with nearly 80%, iOS has 13.2%, Windows Phone 3.7%, and BlackBerry 2.9%. Gartner analyst Bill Menezes states that even new ownership is "not going to address how the company restores itself."

One key asset BlackBerry owns is QNX, the real-time based OS it bought in 2010. QNX is microkernel based, versus the monolithic kernel used by many OS's like Linux. BlackBerry bases its tablet and phone OS's on QNX, which also remains a popular commercial OS for embedded systems.

But what is the angle? What is the selling point? Pretend you work in a phone shop and I come in, my Android is getting a little long in the tooth and I'm looking for something new...sell it to me. What does Blackberry give me, the non enterprise consumer, that Android and iOS does not?

Because from what I have read pretty much all the killer features of Blackberry require a backend that Joe and Sally simply won't have or are features they won't care about. Remember that thanks to familiarity and inertia its hard to get people to give up something they already know how to use so it can't just be a little better or close enough, it has to have some features that will really make me reach for my wallet but so far I haven't heard of any.